When I undertook the translation of Aristotle's "Historia Animalium", I could not imagine from the beginning what the engagement with a work that had the world of animals as its subject would hold for me. As I progressed, on the one hand, I had in front of me a rich and inexhaustible zoological material with information, observations, empirical data, and comments; on the other hand, the most important thing seemed to be the fact that one could discern in the work the researcher-student - here Aristotle - who examines, observes, and classifies the phenomena of nature in order to know them: a kind of research that starts from this work and then we see it completed in other zoological works; there, indeed, the effort to find the causes and reveal the way nature acts stands out. [...]

(From the translator's note)